Oromo

The Oromo are a Cushitic-speaking people of the Horn of Africa and the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, living mainly in the Oromia region with smaller communities in northern Kenya. Recent estimates put their number at about 41.5 million, some 36 per cent of Ethiopia's population. Their history is shaped by a great sixteenth-century expansion and by Gadaa, a distinctive system of self-government based on age grades.

Linguistic and ethnographic studies suggest that the Oromo originated in the far south of Ethiopia, around Lakes Chew Bahir and Chamo, and were confined to southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya until about 1530. Their language, Afaan Oromoo, belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family and is today the most widely spoken first language in Ethiopia. Older documents written by neighbouring peoples and Europeans call them Galla, a name of disputed origin that is now considered derogatory.

Under Gadaa, men passed through a series of grades lasting eight years each, and every eight years leaders were chosen by consensus to serve a single fixed term before handing over power. A council, a general assembly and a religious assembly shared authority, and the system regulated political, economic, social and ritual life. The Oromo also developed their own lunisolar calendar. UNESCO inscribed it on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016.

The earliest known written mention of the Oromo is a "Galla River" on the world map completed by the Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro in 1460. In the sixteenth century, after the long Ethiopian–Adal War had exhausted both the Christian empire and the Adal Sultanate, large numbers of Oromo moved north into the central highlands, an episode often called the Great Oromo Migrations. Gadaa organised every man as a warrior, and newly acquired horses gave Oromo cavalry great mobility. The monk Bahrey wrote the first detailed account of them in 1593. The Barentu confederation spread east into Arsi, Bale, Hararghe and Wollo, while the Borana moved north-west into Shewa, Illubabor and Welega.

Oromo groups soon became part of Ethiopian politics. Emperor Susenyos I, who grew up among the Oromo, came to power with their support and settled Oromo groups in Gojjam and Begemder. From 1784 to 1853, in the era of the princes, the Oromo Yejju dynasty were the real masters of the empire. In the south-west, five Oromo states arose in the Gibe region, among them Jimma, as fertile land encouraged farming, trade and hereditary kingship. Further east, many Oromo remained pastoralists until the late nineteenth century.

From the 1870s Menelik II of Shewa conquered the Oromo lands one after another, aided by imported firearms and Oromo disunity. Where resistance was strong, as in Arsi, settler-soldiers took land and local people became tenants; where rulers submitted, as in Jimma, they kept some autonomy. Under Haile Selassie much of that autonomy was removed.

The traditional religion, Waaqeffanna, is monotheistic. According to one 2016 estimate, about half of the Oromo are Sunni Muslim and a third Ethiopian Orthodox, with most of the rest Protestant; around 3 per cent keep the old faith. Oromo identity politics grew from the Mecha and Tulama Self-Help Association, founded in 1963 and later banned. Oromia is now a regional state of federal Ethiopia, and Afaan Oromoo, written in the Latin-based Qubee alphabet, is one of the country's official languages. Large protests from 2015 onward, and the deaths of many protesters, have been documented by human-rights groups, and Oromo politics remains deeply contested. The annual Irreechaa thanksgiving festival at Bishoftu draws huge crowds.

Our maps draw the Oromo from 1530 to 1800, an approximate area in southern Ethiopia that later spreads north. They sit beside Ethiopia and, in the east, the Sultanate of Aussa. See also Kenya.